Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.
The meekest of animals will fight bravely when it is backed against a wall, for it has nothing left to lose. A poor man is more deadly than a rich man because he puts less value on his own life.
I shudder at the concept of a world tamed.
We are all prisoners at one time or another in our lives, prisoners to ourselves or to the expectations of those around us. It is a burden that all people endure, that all people despise, and that few people ever learn to escape.
To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy.
Whenever you’re writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragons and magic.
I loved the world of imagination.
In the past, TSR and now Wizards of the Coast have asked me to do game stats for my characters, and I’m never comfortable doing that. It’s all relative after all.
No one will ever write a fantasy novel better than The Hobbit.
Never confuse honor with stupidity!
I’ve spared with demons from the Nine Hells themselves, I shall barely break a sweat here today.
Loss of empathy might well be the most enduring and deep-cutting scar of all, the silent blade of an unseen emey, tearing at our hearts and stealing more than our strength- Drizzt Do’Urden.
A world without dragons is a world not worth living in.
There is a wide world out there, full of pain, but filled with joy as well. The former keeps you on the path of growth and the latter makes the journey tolerable.
Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship.
Drizzt had always suspected it, but now it was confirmed, that “welcome” was his favortie word in the Common Tongue, and a word, he understood with no equivalent in the language of the drow.
And the real thing can kill you whether you believe in it or not.
I need no fantasies to belittle the great treasures that I already possess.
I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn’t excite me and didn’t even remotely connect to the realities of my life.
I’m trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.
Because in fantasy perhaps more than in any other genre, the character is rewarded for making the right choices and punished for making the bad. Ask Boromir.